But He Spun So Well
by Mad Poetess
Summary: Rumple-who? (As well as being an evil take on the little guy, it's possibly the world's longest run-on sentence with the exception of anything written by James Joyce.)


But He Spun So Well  
  
He was, no one would argue,  
A nasty little man,  
Wizened and dirty and   
Possessed of a sidewise tongue  
That muttered inappropriate truths  
At inopportune moments,   
And besides, he just looked wrong,  
Squinting and knowing and sly, but  
She had, she was forced to admit,  
Made a bargain, and a bargain  
Must be seen to be honored,  
Especially by social climbing spinners  
With aspirations to the throne, and  
He did, she couldn't deny,  
Spin a roomful of stable-muck  
Widdershins and back,   
Til it was gleaming in the morning   
Like new-minted princess-hair, and   
After that night spent dreaming while he spun  
She had, to the delight of an heirless King,  
Produced a healthy, screaming, defecating boy  
From out those lovely peasant hips, and so  
He was, according to that midnight hour pact,  
Entitled to take off with the gold and pink cherub  
Clutched in those grimy talons,  
Stealing away into the gloom  
Of whatever back-alley faeryland  
Such smelly little fellows call home, but  
She did, if the truth be told,  
Have a certain partiality   
Towards the tiny royal brat,  
Having spent so many months  
In such intimate quarters with him,  
And more, a certain liking,   
Having increased with time, for her own head,  
Which would most certainly be   
Removed from her possession under sharp circumstances  
If she handed the newborn prince  
To the squalid wee goblin man, so  
They struck, as two so at odds will often do,  
A newer bargain, she in a very attractive desperation,  
He with a raspy, gargled laugh  
And a slitwise smile she would never mistake  
For generosity, and thus,  
She searched, with a country mother's hearthborn will  
And a city queen's adopted power, for the hint of a snatch  
Of a whisper of a tale or a song or   
Some underworld census that would tell her   
His precious, bloody, name,  
So she could offer it up to him with a smile  
And a flip of her hair, and keep at home the boychild  
In his princely cradle in her queenly rooms, and  
He did, being what he was, everything he could  
To help her on her way, paying pageboys to laugh it  
Behind taverns, strumpets to whisper it  
To their guardsman lovers, visiting merchants  
To mutter it, muddy children to sing it as they  
Jumped rope in the streets, and still  
She had, having only the resources of the best-arrayed  
Group of gossips and spies and tale-tellers in the land,  
Heard nothing, stamped her size-five foot in frustration,  
Two nights in a row, until at last  
He had, growing tired of the chase and the waiting and  
The interminable twiddling of grimy thumbs,  
Lured the vice-chancellor of the privy boudoir   
To a tiny clearing on the edge of polite society  
And danced his dance and sang his song  
For his unsuspecting audience, so that  
She would, straggle-haired and hopeless in the last hours,  
Rocking the fat prince-price in her arms,  
Finally hear, (but never understand)  
The name that would buy her life and time  
And ten odd years to reign  
Before the enthusiastic and rather too fertile king  
Wore her out with the next ten, and  
She did, waiting, pacing, hear, and did wait,  
Standing with a half-mad smile of glee, until  
He heard, black scowl plastered across his wrinkly face,  
"Rumplestiltskin!" shouted in the moonless room,  
And could finally stamp his size-twelve foot  
With a satisfying crack, opening the fissure  
Back to where he'd been wanting to be all along, and  
She would never, crooning joyfully, mindlessly, to the wriggler  
In her arms, the one who would grow, but not much,  
Who would always be playing in the mud  
And whispering vicious truths  
To his sisters, with a merry grin,  
And making her wish  
She could still spin straw to gold  
To pay for all the leather for all those shoes,  
She would never know, ever, that   
He wasn't, with a slitted grin  
And a wondrous hand at the loom  
And a brat in every kingdom in the west,  
Called Rumplestiltskin  
Any more than she was,  
Or rather, as his name was legion, he could have been, but  
He preferred, on the whole, to be rather more subtle about things.  



End file.
